Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Nazis lost at Moscow before Lend Lease began

One other factor...
Larry J — (archived)

in the Soviet victory was Hitler's stupid racial policies. When the Germans rolled through places like the Ukraine, they were welcomed as liberators from Stalin's tyranny. It was just a few years after Stalin's forced starvation that resulted in an estimated 2 million deaths. Instead of capitalizing on that goodwill, the Germans started executing thousands and enslaving millions. The end result was, as you mentioned, a reawakening of Soviet patriotism. It also stiffened the resolve in other parts of the Soviet Union to resist the Germans.

As you mentioned, millions of Soviet soldiers were captured by the Germans in 1941. It wasn't long afterwards that Stalin made surrendering a state crime. Those Soviets who survived German captivity were sent home to imprisonment and forced labor after the war. One factor in the Soviet victory was Stalin's utter ruthlessness. While he is perhaps the biggest mass murderer of all history (with the possible exception of Mao), I doubt the Soviet Union would've survived the Nazi onslaught without Stalin.

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